What is a hybrid cloud? Benefits and advantages
Summary
Explore the details and benefits of a hybrid cloud.
Read time: 6 minutes
...updated 3/14/2024...
What is a hybrid cloud & how can it benefit your business?
A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing solution that combines private and public cloud services to meet all of an enterprise’s computing needs.
People like private clouds because they retain complete control over their IT infrastructure, data, and security posture. But maintaining a local private cloud can be a major undertaking and requires a continuous investment in hardware, licensing, resources, and personnel.
People like public clouds because they can lease needed services, paying only for resources consumed, without investing in infrastructure while a managed services provider (MSP) handles all the support details.
A hybrid cloud combines the best of both worlds. An organization benefits by keeping control over mission-critical data and applications as with an on-premises solution (a.k.a., the private cloud), while leveraging off-premises resources (a.k.a., public clouds) for cost-effective long term data storage and shared access to powerful computing assets and services the organization could not implement as cost-effectively on its own.
Hybrid clouds offer flexibility to shift workloads between clouds and spin up new virtual assets as needs change over time. With the proper software tools in place to connect them all for efficient communications between each service, IT administrators can manage their entire cloud environment from a single pane of glass.
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Hybrid cloud benefits
The primary driver behind the shift to a hybrid cloud strategy is flexibility. Flexibility to scale, to move workloads, to launch new applications, and to quickly recover from interruptions to service. A properly implemented hybrid cloud strategy brings the following benefits to the organization:
Customized environments
Businesses can select the environment that best suits the application to maximize accessibility and minimize costs. Keep mission-critical apps and data in the private cloud for enhanced control and security and move secondary apps and data that can tolerate minor interruptions to less expensive public clouds.
Business continuity
Having some computing assets managed at off-premises data centers provides redundancies that protect data integrity and availability in the event of a natural disaster, cyberattack, or interruption to service. A hybrid cloud reduces risk and speeds recovery time should either the private or public cloud experience an outage for any reason and eliminates the need for IT staff to perform regular backups and store copies of the entire environment.
Support for hybrid and remote workforces
Properly authorized employees have global access to information and can work from anywhere there is an internet connection. Applications can be deployed, and updates can be rolled out to team members and devices wherever they are.
Cost reduction
Transferring some services and applications to the public cloud reduces internal costs and offers accounting advantages by reclassifying capital expenses (CapEx) as operational expenses (OpEx). Staffing expenses can be trimmed, as well as the calls for upgrading on-premises hardware and servers.
Customers are charged only for the resources consumed, driving down expenses. This can be especially advantageous to businesses with cyclical needs. For example, a financial services company may need scale-up computing power during tax season. Rather than pay for resources that will sit idle for most of the year, the organization can save on costs by increasing public cloud resource consumption only when necessary.
Further, a hybrid model requires much less on-premises space and infrastructure support compared to a strictly private cloud. That translates into thousands of square feet of data center space and computing assets that need not be built, powered, and cooled by the enterprise.
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